{"id":178158,"date":"2019-02-20T19:40:00","date_gmt":"2019-02-21T00:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/02\/20\/whiskey-tango-foxtrot-6\/"},"modified":"2019-02-20T19:40:00","modified_gmt":"2019-02-21T00:40:00","slug":"whiskey-tango-foxtrot-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/02\/20\/whiskey-tango-foxtrot-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>This is the first time ever that I have heard of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2019-02-20\/top-ethics-watchdog-rejects-ross-s-financial-disclosure-form\">the Office of Government Ethics refusing to certify a disclosure form from a cabinet official<\/a>:<\/div>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The top federal ethics watchdog has rejected U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross\u2019s 2017 financial disclosure <a href=\"https:\/\/extapps2.oge.gov\/201\/Presiden.nsf\/PAS+Index\/A28CA739CF331E63852583A600727D04\/$FILE\/Wilbur-L-Ross-2018-278.pdf\">form<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The Office of Government Ethics declined to certify Ross\u2019s latest financial disclosure because after reporting that he had sold off his shares in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/quote\/BKU:US\">BankUnited Inc.<\/a> that year, he actually sold the stock in October 2018. According to a later filing, he said he mistakenly believed that the shares had been sold earlier. <\/p>\n<p>In a <a href=\"https:\/\/oge.gov\/web\/OGE.nsf\/0\/955C1F75C94F1D1F852583A60074C4CB\/$FILE\/Letter%20to%20Commerce%20DAEO.pdf\">letter<\/a> sent to the Commerce Department\u2019s top ethics officer, OGE Director Emory Rounds wrote that Ross\u2019s 2017 report,\u201cinaccurately reported that he sold all of his stock when in fact he had not done so.\u201d Rounds also said that Ross was not in compliance with his ethics agreement when he filed the annual report in 2018.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n<p>OGE has no enforcement authority, and relies on inspectors general or the Justice Department to investigate whether federal ethics rules or conflict of interest laws have been broken. In his letter, Rounds said that Maggi had informed him that Commerce was providing its inspector general with copies of all of Ross\u2019s financial disclosure reports.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Ross may have the dubious distinction of being the flat-out worst member of the Trump cabinet.<\/p>\n<p>He is, after all, the mook who suggested that furloughed federal workers take out bank loans to address their missed paychecks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is the first time ever that I have heard of the Office of Government Ethics refusing to certify a disclosure form from a cabinet official: The top federal ethics watchdog has rejected U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross\u2019s 2017 financial disclosure form. The Office of Government Ethics declined to certify Ross\u2019s latest financial disclosure because &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[469,368,406,681,454],"class_list":["post-178158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-bureaucracy","tag-corruption","tag-stupid","tag-transparency","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178158"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}